


Fireside

by yuletide_archivist



Category: The Brothers Grimm RPF
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-12-21
Updated: 2008-12-21
Packaged: 2018-01-25 04:04:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1630517
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Story by Kiera Kingsley</p><p>"It's a curious thing, he continued, "not at all like most of our work. I don't believe I could ever bring myself to publish it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fireside

**Author's Note:**

> Happy holidays, vissy! I hope this didn't turn out *too* angsty for you.  
> I know I'm playing around with timelines and actual history--please forgive any inaccuracies or mistakes that may be found here.
> 
> Written for vissy

 

 

"I do have a story to tell," Wilhelm offered, lifting his head from the back of the chair where it rested.

It was at the close of the day; sleet was gleaming wetly against the windowpanes, spattering fitfully outside They were huddled around the fireplace holding cups of claret and negus, a bowl of gingerbread and spiced nuts shared between them. Dortchen was curled up in the crook of his arm, nestled against him, as Jacob reclined on the couch opposite. 

"Go on," their hostess urged. She was stretching out her slippers towards the fire, lazily sprawling as much as whalebone and petticoats permitted, but the look she shot Wilhelm was alert with curiosity--and a keen, almost disconcerting intelligence. 

"It's a curious thing," he continued, "not at all like most of our work. I don't believe I could ever bring myself to publish it."

"Why not?"

Dortchen was looking up at him, her hair soft against his sleeve, her eyes velvety in the firelight. He took a small breath to steady himself and shook his head before continuing: "It's the story of--a quilt man."

"A quilt man?" Their host's fingers were never quite still, almost as if they were constantly itching for pen and ink to scratch with; he was fiddling absentmindedly with the tassel on the cushion now. 

"Or so he was called. I can't quite make it out myself." Wilhelm looked down at Dortchen, nudged a kiss up against her temple as she smiled--sleepily, glowing contentedly. "This was before I met you, back when I was at Marburg--well, a group of friends and I, in our first year, took advantage of the holiday season to visit Switzerland, further south."

In the dim light Jacob rustled as he propped himself up on his elbow to listen. Nobody could quite see the look in his eyes except Wilhelm, and to him it was unreadable--as always, now. "And during that time, we made the acquaintance of a sailor who'd returned from an expedition to the North Pole and it was he who told us this story: that they'd picked up a stranded man off a small island nearby, close to Greenland. He was all bundled into a dogsled and wrapped in furs, and he was shivering all over--very ill with fever and the cold, close to death--and they brought him aboard and lay him in a cot."

"The quilt man?" their host pursued.

"No--the sailor never spoke to him. Only said that he was very thin and pale, and constantly screamed out by night, thrashing about in nightmares. He said the captain was quite fond of him, and they sat together often as the man recovered, and then... well, one night, the man vanished."

Their hostess started up straight. "Vanished?"

"Ja. Just like that. They searched the entire ship, and the captain most desperately of all--the sailor said he was like a man possessed, they'd never seen him so wild--but there was no sign of the man until three days later. The ship was setting its course back to England, with the captain dull and silent like a broken man, when they came upon two figures floating in the water.

"Well, the bodies were stiff and cold long before they fished them out, they'd crack with brittle ice if you tried to separate them. And they recognized their stranger by light of their lanterns, but the other man..." Wilhelm looked into the heart of the fire. "The sailor called him the quilt man because it reminded him of how his mother used to sew: little tiny stitches all around a border of cloth, sewing different pieces together. They examined this other man and they found lines of stitching everywhere--a queer, careful kind of stitching, not like a woman's--all over his body, as if his very limbs were joined together by thread and needle. The sailor said he got one good look at the body and was wretchedly sick over the side of the railing, though he'd never been seasick in fifteen years of sailing. 

"And this monstrous--person, or creature--had the stranger from the dogsled clasped in his arms so tightly they couldn't pry him loose--had his face buried in the stranger's hair, and his shoulders all hunched in as if he knew they were trying to tear the stranger away."

"But who could it be?" Dortchen's voice seemed oddly distant. Jacob's eyes never left his.

"God alone knows. They buried the two of them together at sea, in one canvas sail--they never did separate them." Wilhelm swallowed; his eyes were blurring dangerously in the firelight. "I could never make myself publish such a thing, not even as an academic treatise."

"Why ever not?" their host demanded.

There was a glimmer in Jacob's eyes now. Wilhelm didn't answer for a long moment, and then: "Because the suggestion it leaves behind in the human imagination is too horrible. I can look at the grotesque in our folktales for children with disinterest , but something in this tale--in the perverse, twisted regard this monster must have had for this man--"

"It is horrible," Dortchen said with a shiver. "Don't let us talk about it, please."

Wilhelm smiled weakly, and hugged her closer and murmured, "Forgive me, liebling," and their hostess and host refilled their cups. But Jacob's eyes were still on his when he looked back up, and a lifetime's conversation passed between their gazes in an instant. 

When Wilhelm looked away again, he blinked rapidly before smiling down at Dortchen again. Their hostess was standing up. "Pray excuse me for a moment--"

"Don't linger too long, Mary," their host said with an indulgent smile.

She did not, and the fireside talk drifted off into the weather and the sailing by Lake Geneva. But Mary went to bed that night in thoughtful silence, staring out the window for a long while, and when she slept her dreams were strange--haunted, and half-formed.

*

"I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavour to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world." \--Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin 

 


End file.
